The shock of a non-Brexit political story

For more than three years, Britain’s attempt to leave the EU has been the dominant news story for political journalists, and the coverage has been particularly intense over the past four months.

But the discovery of 39 bodies in a container lorry in Essex cut through the obsession with treaty clauses and parliamentary procedure like a shock of lightning, suddenly making visible a hidden story.

There have been other non-Brexit stories in the news recently. There have been goings on in the royal family, and between Coleen Rooney and Rebekah Vardy, but the tragedy on an industrial estate in Grays is a political story, and a sharp reminder that there is more to politics than Brexit.

I plead guilty to thinking, whenever Theresa May talked about human trafficking and modern slavery, that these were worthy words designed to give the impression that there was more to her government than its failure to deliver Brexit.

But they are important subjects in their own right, and the question we should have asked of May was not whether she was succeeding in burnishing her image, but whether her policies were effective.

As Mary Dejevsky wrote in these pages on Friday, the scale of the horror in Essex is at the same time a cause for sympathy and for concern about the failure of effective immigration control.

It would seem that, for all her reputation as a home secretary and a prime minister who espoused a restrictive policy on immigration, May’s legacy is mainly one of ineffectiveness. She clung to a net immigration target of 100,000 a year, which was never met. She was responsible for the “hostile environment” policy which gave us the injustices that have affected so many of the Windrush generation.

And for all her pronouncements about trafficking and slavery, the container-coffin on the Waterglade Industrial Park suggests that her government failed to make much progress in curtailing this inhuman trade.

Yours,

John Rentoul

Chief political commentator